3 - Reference and Quantification

Summary

As logicians see them, time and modality are closely related; both involve operators over sets of possibilities that may be ordered in various ways. Tenses and modal verbs both create intensional contexts and provide a showcase for possible worlds semantics. Even though they disagree about the status of possible worlds and past and future times, philosophers agree that they provide an adequate basis for modeling necessity and time. Using times and worlds, linguists have developed highly successful theories of tense, aspect, modal constructions, and conditionals.